The widespread adoption of multifunctional mobile communications devices by individuals and enterprises has made it possible to move many business functions into the mobile realm. For instance, banks provide users with mobile phone applications that allow the users to deposit checks by photographing the check and then sending the image to the bank through a wireless mobile communications interface. It would be worthwhile if users could use mobile technology to transfer other types of business documents as well. Unfortunately, this has proven difficult because images taken from mobile devices are not always of sufficient quality to allow recipients to extract data accurately therefrom.
Photographs taken from mobile devices typically have defects introduced by factors such as lighting, shadow, and the ability of the user to take a clean photo. Without correction, these defects negatively affect the accuracy of data extraction. Therefore, prior to performing data extraction, recipients of documents must remove defects. In the case of checks, this is not overly burdensome because checks are small and have a limited amount of information fields from which data requires extraction (e.g. name, account number, routing number, etc.) However, larger documents create problems of scale. Larger documents have more data to extract and correspondingly more defects to remove. Removing a large number of defects greatly increases the time and processing power needed to extract information from larger documents. This has made it impractical to use mobile devices as an efficient means of capturing documents for later information extraction.
A component or a feature that is common to more than one drawing is indicated with the same reference number in each of the drawings.